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Thursday, 3 May 2012

Quickie Tip: PDF Pattern Downloads

Welcome to a rather unglamorous post on how to download and save a PDF pattern. E books are starting to overtake 'real' books on site like Amazon and paper patterns are following suit which has many benefits; they are much quicker to produce, they are available wherever you are in the world and you can save them to print out on thick paper and if you mess up, they should be there to print out again. I thought I would take you step by step through how the Sew-Ichigo pattern reaches you in case this is a new experience for any of you. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the PDF, this is free and available here. When you purchase your Sew-Ichigo pattern you will receive an email like this:

Notice the note- the link expires after 3 attempts. This means that if you are looking at the email on your phone and click the blue download link three times you will use up all the available attempts! When you do click this is what you should get a Sew Ichigo message next :

Clicking will take you to the option to save the file somewhere onto your computer .

26th May 2012 Edited to add- we have now managed to make this a single PDF download without a Zip file but I will leave the rest of the info below as it is useful for other downloads you might use! With a single download, all you will need to do is save it either onto hard drive, disc or cloud e.g. Dropbox.
As our files are quite big we store them in a Zip file which compresses the size and makes them easier to handle. Inside the Zip files you will find 3 PDF files for this pattern set. My email links automatically opens through firefox and the default option is to save the file so I click OK. The Zip file automatically saves to a file called Downloads, it may be a different place for your computer. Give it a little time to download...watch the blue line to see when it is ready!

The zip is ready but I know from past experience that if I just leave it in Downloads, I will never find it again so I click the zip file to open it...

And a folder called Zip5 pops out- you can see it at the top in the pic below. You could save the whole folder- right click and save on the location of your choice, I usually chose Desktop initially so it is in easy reach.

When you open the folder you finally get to the PDF files inside.

In the first file, pages 1-13 this is the front cover, now you can start using your pattern!

I also have an ipad so to make sure I can access all my PDF patterns on it I save them to Dropbox and have a folder for all my PDF patterns. I like to use my ipad to display instructions rather than print them out so this is an ideal way to have all project available. Dropbox is a free 'Cloud' based storage system, basically an online filing cabinet which you can store files on for either easy access or security- a crashed computer would mean losing all your PDF patterns amongst all the other things. There are other Cloud systems out there as well as Dropbox.

I hope that sorts out a little of the mystery of PDF patterns for any of you who are new to this. Personally I know I have less chance of me losing a PDF than a paper pattern, I only have to look at a pair of scissors and they are gone so I have no hope with bits of paper! You can buy 'Kitchen Classics' here